“Why what?”
“Why you sent Miguel Sanchez after me. Why you told him to kill me. Why I have twenty-eight stitches in various parts of my body because of the games you played with me.”
His eyebrows rose. He studied her face for a long moment.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do, Morty. You know exactly what I’m talking about, and you knew I’d figure it out the second I saw the burns on his temples.”
“You should probably go, Abigail. I’m on my way out, anyway.”
“You sold the device.”
That caused him to hesitate. He’d turned back to his boxes, dragging one around with his single hand, checking the contents like he couldn’t remember what he’d just placed inside. He stopped in the middle of lifting the stump of his other arm, the narrow appendage jerking a little before it rested back against his side.
“Is that what this is about? You’ve come back to rehash an argument we had three years ago?”
“I’ve come here to find out why you would use me to show some buyer what it’s capable of.”
“I haven’t talked to you in three years. Why would I do something like that?” He smiled politely at Abigail a student he knew would never make it passed first-year biology. “I think you’re confused.”
“And I think you hired Mastiff Security to protect me when you realized this guy might actually be capable of killing me.”
“Why? Because I’m still in love with you?” That smile came back. “I stopped giving a shit what you thought the day you packed your stuff and walked out of my house, Abbie.”
She tilted her head to the side, wishing he hadn’t called her that.
“I do owe you, though. Hiring Mastiff was brilliant.”
“Was it? Is that because . . .”
He stopped, catching himself. But she could see the fury in his eyes, could see how his hand was clutched into a fist at his side.
“You came here to entrap me,” he said through clenched teeth.
“No. I just came here to talk. This is about me and nothing else.”
“Bullshit! You’re wearing a wire.”
“Come check me out,” she said, waving her hands in the air, beckoning him toward her. “Do what you need to do.”
He hesitated for a second. Morty walked toward her with something like a leer in his eyes.
“This is going to be a little awkward, what with the one hand and everything.”
She shrugged. “It never held you back before.”
He smiled at that, a more natural smile that reminded her of the man she once fell in love with. But then his hand slipped over her throat, his fingers pushing themselves into her hair like he thought she’d hide a recording device there. And then he was slipping his palm over her outer arm, pushing it between her arm and her side. He took his sweet time feeling up her breasts, finally sliding his hand under her blouse to force his fingers under the wire of her bra.
Abigail stood still, her eyes closed, saying the same thing over and over in her head, Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!
But Morty wasn’t in a hurry. He was clearly enjoying himself to no end.
He slid his hand over her naked belly underneath the shirt before sliding fingers into each of the pockets of her jeans. Then he was crouching in front of her, his hand forcing it’s way between her legs, touching her more intimately as she stood there fully dressed than he ever had when they were lovers.
“Are you satisfied?” she asked when he finally stood and backed away.
“No. But I believe you don’t have a recording device on you.”
She ignored the sexual reference and crossed her arms over her chest for a second to hide the shudder that rushed through her. Then she dropped her arms and leaned back against the narrow tabletop that marked the first row of students’ seats.
“Will you talk to me now?”
“What do you want to know?”
“You used my device on that man, Miguel Sanchez, right?”
“Our device. My name is on the patent application, too.”
“The application you never sent in.”
“I did, actually.” His eyes moved over her breasts again, taking in her hardened nipples. “I sent it in not long after you left. I thought for a while that I might continue the research we’d begun. And then I got distracted by other work, other students, and didn’t come back to it until six months ago when this company made an offer for it.”
“What company?”
He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Does it matter? The only thing that should matter is that the device is packed up and headed to them, and their check was just deposited into my account. If you came looking for a piece of the pie, you’re three years too late.”
“I don’t want your money, Morty. I never did.”
“Yeah, we covered that, didn’t we?”
She tilted her head, refusing to be drawn into a discussion of their past. His eyes were dancing with emotion. He clearly thought that he’d gotten something over on her, that he’d drawn her back in after pushing her away.
Did he think she’d come back to rekindle their romance? If that was it, he couldn’t have been further than the truth.
“You put the device on that guy. You retrained his brain cells.”
“I put it on him. The buyer wanted to see if the device could cause someone’s entire personality to change. They picked this perfectly mild-mannered man and asked me to turn him into a killer. It wasn’t nearly as difficult as they thought it might be.”
“That’s not what the device was designed for.”
“No. But Coke started as a medical treatment. There are lots of things that started as one thing and became another.”
Abigail bit her tongue, more annoyed than she wanted to admit by him comparing their device to a soda. She reached up and dragged her fingers through her hair, watching him with this heaviness in her chest.
“Why me? Why did you send him after me?”
“Maybe I missed you.”
“Maybe it was more than that.”
“Maybe I was still angry at you.”
“But you hired Mastiff to protect me.”
“And what a mistake that was! I never imagined you’d end up fucking the guy they sent to protect you!” There was real anger in his words. He brushed his hand over his mouth, moving forward a few feet, coming toward her like he intended to hurt her. But then he stopped. “It was supposed to be a controlled game. He was supposed to take the bodyguard out and lure you to him. Then he was supposed to hold you in that barn overnight, taunt you, scare the shit out of you. And then he was just going to disappear. But you and your boyfriend,” he spat out the word, “had to escape the barn and turn it into a totally different game.”
“You were watching.”
“We had the whole barn wired! For weeks. Not just the barn, either. I’ve had a whole team of people at your farm, setting up cameras in the house, the barns, the shed. Even the chicken coop. I knew your routine better than you did. And when I heard you talking to that old couple about their cruise, I knew it was the perfect time for this little experiment.”
Abigail shook her head. “You’re lying! Where would you get the equipment to do something like that?”
“You would be shocked the kind of money people are willing to fork over for a device like this one. They gave me more than enough to watch a dozen people for months. And, let me tell you, I learned a lot about you in the process.”
Abigail blushed, wondering what he’d caught her doing on his cameras. Did he have one in the bathroom, too?
She’d never be able to step foot in that house again without thinking of him and his cameras.
He came toward her again, touching her face with the back of his fingers the same way Axel often did.
“Why’d you sleep with him?”
Anger rushed through her. “You sent a killer after me! I thought I was about to die!”
He moved closer, his sour b
reath washing over her. “I loved you so deeply, Abigail. You were the first woman I ever let into my heart after what my mother had done to me. And you tore it to pieces, stomped on it like it didn’t matter.”
“You turned the device we’d created to help people like your mother into a weapon. You ruined that man’s life!”
“He volunteered,” he said, as though that negated his part in the whole thing.
“You’re a sick man, Morty.”
She thought he’d get mad and move away from her. Instead, he smiled again. “You were never in any real danger, Abbie. I made sure of that. The bullet in your thigh was an accident, a ricochet. And the truck accident was more on him than on me, don’t you think?”
“Someone could have died.”
“But no one did. And my bank account is singing, so I think it all worked out.”
He turned away from her and went calmly back to the podium and finished packing his things.
“You should be in jail.”
“Nope. I’m on a flight out of the country in three hours.” He glanced over his shoulder at her. “You could go tell the cops, but by the time you find someone to take you seriously, I’ll be drinking mojitos on a beach in a country that has no extradition treaty with the United States.” He bit his lip as his eyes moved over Abigail’s breasts one more time. “I guess that makes you wish you had found a way to bring a recording device in here, doesn’t it?”
She nodded in agreement. “It does.”
He popped the lids on his boxes and dropped them to the floor, scooting them with his foot onto a dolly he’d had sitting off to one side. The boxes in place, he tipped it back and turned toward the door. But then he paused, coming to her one more time.
“I did love you,” he said. “Maybe a part of me was hoping you would realize what I’d done, and you’d come looking for me. Maybe I hoped that you would remember how good it was between us, and you’d beg me to take you with me when I left the country.”
Abigail studied his face for a long moment, even reached up and caressed his cheek lightly. “I loved you so much, Morty. I loved the enthusiasm you had for the work, loved the excitement you showed every time someone showed just a little interest in your theories. And I ignored the darker moments, the ugly moods and the angry words you sometimes spoke to me when you really meant to sling them at your mother. I knew you had problems, but I never imagined . . .” She stopped herself, aware of the sound of the door opening at the back of the lecture hall. “I loved a fantasy. I’ll never make that mistake again.”
“Morton Appleton?” a deep voice called as footsteps came toward them. “You’re under arrest for attempted murder and false imprisonment.”
Morty shook his head, staring at her. “How? You don’t—”
“I guess you’ll find out at your trial.”
Abigail nodded to the detective who’d been so kind as to agree to work Axel’s plan with them. They sat up half the night last night going over it, the three of them. The detective worrying the legal issues, Axel worrying the technical ones. And Abigail, putting her life in the hands of these two men and incredibly relieved it had all worked out as planned.
Even more relieved to slide into Axel’s arms now that it was over.
The last thing she saw of Morty was the dark jealousy in his eyes as they walked him passed her and Axel. His eyes still moving over her like he couldn’t quite grasp what he was seeing.
“Good-bye,” she whispered as he disappeared from her sight.
Chapter 36
Boston, Massachusetts
Revere Hotel
Axel poured champagne all around. The cop, Detective Jack O’Brien—how Irish was that—shook his head as he held up his glass.
“I never would have believed this if anyone else had come to me with a story like it. To watch that guy spill his guts, staring right into that damn camera! What a fucking idiot!”
“To his credit, he couldn’t have known the camera was there.” Axel picked up the teeny box that contained the camera Mastiff’s tech department had overnighted to him. “This is actually the first time we’ve tested it in the field, and I’ll have to say that I think it was a roaring success!”
“You’ve never used it?” Abigail asked, her voice trembling slightly.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart, he wouldn’t have let anything bad happen to you. The whole time we were watching it go down, he had one hand on the doorknob. He would have been out the door and into that lecture hall in two seconds flat if the camera malfunctioned or you’d been in trouble.” Jack winked at Axel. “Never seen him quite like that with a woman.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve known him . . . how long have I known you, Axel?”
“Since boot camp.”
“Yeah. Ten years. And never saw him that concerned about anyone, not even himself.” Jack drank his champagne and set the glass down. Then he leaned close to Abigail and whispered something in her ear that caused her to look sharply at Axel. Then he was gone, chuckling as he slipped out the hotel suite door.
“What’d he say?”
Abigail lifted her glass to her lips, shaking her head like she had no clue what he was talking about. He watched her sip the bubbly wine, her eyes moving everywhere but to his face.
“I didn’t realize the two of you were friends.”
“We’re not friends. We served together in Afghanistan.”
“There’s a difference?”
“In my mind, there is.”
Axel took the bottle of champagne to the trash and finished what was in his glass before setting it back on the bar. He could hear the questions dancing in her mind, and he didn’t want to answer them. But he also knew that if he was ever going to have a chance of seeing her again, he was going to have to be honest with her.
He’d realized as he watched that man search her for a wire, as he watched her do the bravest thing he’d ever seen another human being do, that he wanted to see her again. Often. Preferably every day.
“I told you that my mother was disinterested, that she lost custody of me and never tried to get me back. That I grew up in the foster care system.”
“Yes.”
“That does things to you, Abigail, growing up in homes where you know you don’t belong, where you’re not wanted. It makes it hard to trust people.” He was quiet for a long moment. “I made the choice a very long time ago not to let anyone in. I decided that I was perfectly happy with my own company and didn’t need to make room for others.”
“Weren’t you lonely?”
“No.” He turned and looked at her. “Not until you.”
She blushed again. But she didn’t say anything.
“I work closely with people, learn to trust them as far as I need to in order to survive. But I don’t let them in. People like Jack . . . he saved my life a couple of times over there. I saved his. But I never told him about my childhood, never shared intimate details about my life, not the way he’s done with me. I don’t want him to know who I am because I don’t care what he thinks of me beyond the fact that I was a damn good soldier. Do you understand?”
She nodded. “You don’t want to allow anyone close to you because you don’t want them to hurt you.”
He tilted his head slightly. “I don’t let people close because I don’t see the point. No one ever wanted me, so why should I want them?”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“It is. My mother didn’t want me. My foster parents . . . none of them cared beyond that check every month. My fellow SEALs only wanted me as far as they needed me to have their backs. Beyond that, I didn’t matter to them and they didn’t matter to me.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Abigail—”
“I think you built all this up in your head and convinced yourself that not caring what other people thought of you meant that you were strong, that you were incapable of being hurt. But you’re wrong about not making connections.”
; He started to shake his head, but she went to him and took his head in her hands, refusing to allow him to deny it.
“You know what he said to me when he left? He said that you were in love with me and that it was about damn time. He said, ‘don’t break his heart. He’s probably the best man I know, and I’d hate to have to come looking for you.’ How can you say you never connected with him if he could say something like that about you?”
Axel tried to shake his head again.
“And your boss. He’s called like a dozen times since you picked me up at the airport less than twenty-four hours ago. How many bosses would do that if it wasn’t something they deeply cared about? And I don’t think he’s worried about me or the money because Morty already paid him. He’s concerned about you and getting you home safely.”
“That’s his job. I’m an operative for his company.”
“Does he give all his operatives the length of rope he gave you? This case was over the second they found Miguel Sanchez.”
Axel’s head came up sharply. He hadn’t realized she’d overheard that.
“You aren’t the subtlest guy in the world. And you have more friends in your life than you think you do.” She caressed the side of his face. “You’re not alone. As much as you’ve convinced yourself that you’re better off that way, you aren’t. You have friends. And you have me.”
“Do I?” he asked, tugging her close to him with his hands on her hips. “Do I have you after that stupid thing I did at the hospital?”
She smiled softly. “You’ve had me since the second I walked into my grandfather’s office and found you lying on the ground, freezing to death.”
“Yeah?”
“There is something about finding a naked man in my family barn that just . . . you know. It’s very powerful.”
She giggled, making him laugh. “Next time I think we should take better advantage of our nakedness.”
“Next time? Are you planning on doing it again?”
“I’m planning on doing whatever it takes to make you smile like that.”
She moved closer to him, pressing her hips against his upper thighs. “I think we can keep it a little simpler if you don’t mind. We could just do it the way normal people do it and go into the bedroom, maybe undress each other, and lay together on the soft, warm bed.”
Mastiff Security: The Complete 5 Books Series Page 20